Speaking as someone studying to get their doctorate in the field, this kind of stuff makes my blood boil. Just the bland dismissal of helping people survive during a pandemic that was both caused by and helped exacerbate worsening conditions on all fronts of society by unfettered capitalism.
Time and again the supposed "experts" show no understanding of the real world as it actually exists - apparently giving people money is bad because they'll just use it to pay off debts, but we couldn't just give people more money so they could have some level of economic security (and, yknow, possibly leverage their power as economic agents in the labor market to support that competition mainstream economists love to blather about).
Really it's seeing this stuff uncritically reported that furthers my resolve to try to teach classes that show how economies actually work - how far businesses and capitalists will go to extract every little bit of value from the public's withering corpse, all without the slightest regard for their own long-term preservation.
I know a better world is possible, but people of today have to be shown that.
They never seem to correlate the people who actually keep the economy flowing, as both workers and consumers, with the economy itself for some reason. Must be why they hate FDR’s New Deal with a passion.
